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Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka police raid losing candidate's office

  • Police arrest 15 staff of beaten candidate

* Opposition says planning mass protests

* Editor of pro-opposition paper said to have been arrested

By Ranga Sirilal

COLOMBO, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Police raided the office of Sri Lanka's losing presidential candidate on Friday and arrested 15 ex-military members of his staff, aides said, two days after troops surrounded his hotel on suspicion of a coup plot.

General Sarath Fonseka lost Tuesday's election to incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa by 1.8 million votes, after a bruising campaign with personal attacks by both, who last May stood together in victory over the Tamil Tiger separatists after a 25-year war.

"The police Special Task Force broke into the office of Sarath Fonseka," aide Asanka Magedara told Reuters.

Police arrested 15 of Fonseka's supporters who were in the office at the time of the raid, and seized all the computers and mobile phones there, said Shiral Laktilake, a lawyer for Fonseka.

A Reuters journalist saw police commandos outside Fonseka's office. After the raid, the inside of the office was mostly cleaned out, with boxes, electronic items and papers dumped on the floor. Police spokesman I.M. Karunaratne said he had heard of a raid but could not immediately confirm it.

Opposition officials said the raid was designed to intimidate them and stop their plans to protest against the results. Fonseka has said he will launch a court challenge.

"We are in the process of organising ourselves to launch a massive protest and this sort of action is purely aimed at affecting our morale and preventing us from getting on to any collective action," said Rauf Hakeem, head of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress party that backed the general.

EDITOR ARRESTED

Also on Friday, JVP legislator Vijitha Herath said police arrested Chandana Sirimalwatte, editor of the Lanka newspaper. The paper is seen as favouring the JVP, a Marxist party which joined other opposition parties to back Fonseka.

Karunaratne, the police spokesman, said he had no official statement. Later, a team of police investigators searched the newspaper's office.

On Wednesday, soldiers surrounded the luxury hotel where Fonseka and other opposition leaders went after polling finished and vote counting was proceeding.

The former army commander, a hero to many in the Indian Ocean nation, said he feared arrest but later walked out a free man. The military said it had gone there to arrest army deserters with him that may have been plotting a coup.

The political fracas was unlikely to roil the Colombo Stock Exchange <.CSE>, which hit a record high on Thursday after Rajapaksa's re-election. It was one of 2009's best performers with a 125 percent return.

"There won't be any impact on the equity market or the economy in the short term," a Sri Lankan financial analyst told Reuters. "Investors think there is a stable government and they only think about their returns."

It was closed for a Buddhist holiday on Friday.

Local and international observers generally praised the election's conduct, but condemned campaign violence, abuse of state resources and state media and urged investigation of election complaints. Five people were killed before the vote.

An observer mission from the 54-nation Commonwealth on Friday praised the electoral commission, but said Sri Lanka "will not fully meet key benchmarks for democratic elections" until the panel is allowed sufficient independence to enforce election laws.

Immediately after the war ended in May, Rajapaksa and his brother Gotabaya, a former army officer who is the defence secretary, began to suspect Fonseka might attempt a coup.

So the president promoted him to the newly created job of chief of defence staff, which in effect sidelined Fonseka because he had no control of troops. Fonseka said those were two of the reasons he retired to enter the race in November. (Additional reporting by Shihar Aneez and Andrew Caballero-Reynolds; Writing by Bryson Hull; Editing by Ron Popeski)